Tag: bbc

Own Goal

As Match of the Day goes out on BBC One, chopped to twenty minutes and with no studio punditry or even commentary on the action, here are some random thoughts on Gary Lineker’s tweet:-

  1. He is absolutely correct to point out similarities between the language being used now and that used in 1930s Germany.
  2. He is a sports presenter, so his views on issues outside of the sporting arena are irrelevant to his ability to do his job.
  3. Compare the reaction to that when Andrew Neil regularly spoke out on political matters, including calling Carole Cadwalladr a ‘crazy cat person’ after she exposed Brexit corruption.
  4. If Lineker had gone the other way and praised the government and its policies, there would have been no outrage and no suspensions – Tim Davie refused to deny this when asked about it earlier today. The BBC has capitulated to the right-wing ideologues again.

Lineker will be just fine whatever happens – his skills as a presenter and pundit will have him in high demand from sports channels. The BBC, I’m not so sure about. I cherish it and want to see it thrive, but it has lost its way on matters of impartiality and needs to have a good long rethink of its purpose and goals. A clearout of the Tories at the top couldn’t hurt either.

Rare Replay

Over the Easter weekend, BBC Radio Merseyside broadcast a two-hour special: An Accent Exceedingly Rare: A Love Letter to Liverpool.

This special programme, recorded live at St George’s Hall in March to celebrate the station’s 50th anniversary, and its recent Freedom of the City award.

I stumbled across the broadcast by accident, listening to the radio while having tea with my parents on Monday evening. It seems to have gone out on Good Friday and Easter Monday without much fanfare, which is a shame, as it’s an amazingly ambitious piece of broadcasting. There’s live music, poetry readings, drama pieces performed by Ricky Tomlinson and Pauline Daniels, and — for the broadcasting anoraks — some old jingles and readings of internal memos fished out of the archives.

Old logo of BBC Radio Merseyside (95.8VHF Stereo/1485kHz)

Local radio often gets sneered at for being parochial and uninteresting. This programme may be parochial (I imagine most of the references will go over the heads of people from outside Liverpool), but it was absolutely wonderful to listen to.

It’s also a demonstration of the incredible ability of the BBC, in spite of all its flaws, to do something special when it wants to. Commercial rivals like to attack BBC radio as being unfair competition, but this programme was the sort of thing that Radio City or Capital FM would never do – for one thing, it doesn’t involve playing the same 20 records over and over again.

Listen to An Accent Exceedingly Rare: A Love Letter to Liverpool on iPlayer (available until 30 April)